Are we missing something?

If time and money were the solution to safety on Irish farms, the sad statistics of fatalities and serious injuries would be zero. For over 35 years, through the Farm Action Committee and then the Farm Safety Partnership, I have worked closely with the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) and other farming stakeholders.
Together, we have spearheaded many safety campaigns, introduced the Farm Safety Code of Practice and the Code of Practice on Preventing Accidents to Children and Young Persons in Agriculture. We have initiated many training courses (attended by over 50,000 farmers), distributed countless safety leaflets and videos, and staged safety demonstrations. We have had a presence at the National Ploughing Championships, the farm machinery shows, and other farming events, all at considerable cost.

Serious 

Code of Practice on Preventing Accidents to Children and Young Persons in Agriculture is considered to be a great success, and I was privileged to have spent many days together with HSA officers going though it line by line before it was signed off to ensure there was no ambiguity on the requirement to keep children safe. Since its introduction, the numbers of children killed and injured on our farms has reduced significantly. That said, the loss or injury of even one child is unacceptable. Not only has the above involved a huge financial cost, but also incalculable hours of HSA staff and stakeholders’ time, while minister after minister has made farm safety their top priority.
I could add much more to the above, but I think I have given an indication of how seriously safety on Irish farms is taken. While all this hard work has resulted in reducing child fatalities and serious injuries, sadly, we still have farm-safety problems in the farming community, and particularly among our older farmers. After all this time, I am now forced to ask, have we been missing something in our campaigns or our approach?

Hard to get information

It has always been difficult to obtain information on which to base safety policies. 

I particularly refer to information from hospital emergency departments on those attending with serious injuries caused on the farm. This information has been refused, I am told, because of data protection. In gathering this information, it would not be necessary to identify individuals, just their sex, age, the injuries sustained, and cause. There is a precedent where information was sought from hospitals in relation to accidents involving motorbikes. This eventually led to the mandatory wearing of crash helmets by both drivers and pillion passengers.
Understandably, there is also a reluctance to carry out a deeper analysis with the families who have suffered loss or with those who have life-changing injuries. I believe we need specially trained personnel who, after a period of time, would approach families to discuss with them all the issues that may have contributed to the fatality or life-changing injury. It is my belief that such information would play a major part in developing highly targeted risk-based safety policies by identifying unique workplace hazards and other more personal factors. Understanding actual frontline conditions, would assist greatly in tailoring guidelines to prevent specific accidents.